The Witch and the Werewolf (9 page)

“
Oh,” Cassandra said,
“wow. I’m sorry. Where is he now?”

The boy just shrugged.
There was no reason to tell her.

“
I’m sorry.”

“
You lost someone too,”
Jeremy said. Not a question. He could see her loss like a black
spot on her otherwise azure soul.

“
How do you
know?”

“
I can see it in
you.”

She nodded in agreement,
closed her eyes, and concentrated as if the bubble protecting them
might disappear at any moment.

“
You’re not normal, are
you?” the boy asked.

“
I don’t think either one
of us are,” the girl responded.

“
No, I guess not,” the boy
said.

Eight year old Jeremy had
no idea how his life could change so much in a single day. Was this
weird ability to see without eyes always apart of him or did the
arrival of Wormwood somehow change him?

He watched as cars and
buses pushed by the bubble. The inatimate objects had their own
life-force, that he could see, and were mostly a dull gray. He
cringed when one car, intact and apparently fairly waterproof,
whipped by, a family pounding on the windows to try and get out.
Their auras were a bright red, pulsating with fear. There were
bodies too, by the hundreds; so many that he the girl’s eyes were
closed. The water was filled with garbage and debris. He panicked
as a huge cargo ship passed over them, the bottom of its hull
scraping the top of the bubble.

“
You don’t know how you’re
doing that?” the boy asked again, as if to confirm.

“
No,” she said softly.
“But I think my mother was a witch.”

“
So you’re a
witch?”

“
I think so.”

“
Do you have any other
cool powers?”

Cassandra shrugged.
“Maybe. But my mother is gone, now. I don’t know how I’ll find out
if I do or not.”

“
How do you not know the
powers your mother had? Wouldn’t that be like Bruce Wayne having a
son and the son not know his father was Batman?”

“
More like Wonder Woman,”
the girl commented and Jeremy, despite the situation, couldn’t help
but smile. “But no, I don’t know. She kept me pretty sheltered. I
didn’t get out much and that part of her life was a secret.” He
could hear the sadness in her voice.

“
Those things got her,
didn’t they?”

“
Yes,” she said, and the
bubble faded to bright red, matching her anger. “Werewolves. I’m
going to find them and I’m going to kill them.”

“
They were black as
night,” the boy told her. “I mean… their, colors,”

“
I think aura is the word
you’re looking for,” she said, interrupting.

“
Yeah, auras. They were
black like evil.”

“
What do you mean? Is that
how you’re seeing? Like colors?”

“
Yeah… your glow, when
you’re mad, is red. Before that you were blue, like the bubble. I’m
kind of a purple. Those things, though, they were black. I didn’t
like them at all.”

“
I don’t blame you,
kid.”

“
Don’t call me kid. I’m
almost nine.”

“
Sorry,” she said with a
grin. “Maybe we’re both witches.”

Which would be about the
weirdest thing Jeremy could think of to happen at the end of the
world.

“
How long do you think you
can make it last?”

“
The bubble?”

“
Yeah,” he added. “Do you
feel weird or anything?”

“
I’m tired,” she
said.

“
Can you keep it up till
the water clears?”

“
I…” the doubt was evident
in her hesitancy. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I’m doing
it.”

Jeremy watched as another
ship passed over them, churning sideways and pushing an island of
garbage in front of it. He could see men alive, inside the holds of
the ship, glowing red with panic.

It was going to be a long
night.

“
We made it,” Ross said as the waves receded. “We really made
it.”

The Merick had come to a
rest in the remains of downtown Houston, Texas. Buildings were
ripped away and the streets were filled with the debris and remains
of cars and, worse, so many corpses. His wife stood next to him on
the deck, looking over the side at the devastation Wormwood had
wrought. The skies were filling with black clouds and the
temperature, despite the summer month, was dropping
rapidly.

“
It’s getting cold,” Maria
said, huddled up to his side. “And look at those clouds? Why are
they so dark?”

“
They aren’t clouds,” Ross
told her. “Not like regular ones. They are dust and debris kicked
up from the impacts. They will, over the course of the next couple
of weeks, blot out the sun.”

“
Oh my god, Ross. How will
we survive without the sun?”

“
The hold is filled with
enough supplies to last a camp of a thousand several months. It
will last our little group much, much longer. We’ll make it till
the sun comes out or help arrives,” he told her.

“
But what about the other
people?”

“
What other
people?”

“
The ones down
there?”

Ross followed to where she
was pointing and saw the group of people milling around the ship.
Where had they come from, he wondered. How could someone survive
that destruction on the ground?

“
They can’t get to us,”
Ross assured his wife. “And even if they could, we are armed. We
will be fine.”

“
But they survived.
Shouldn’t the supplies FEMA gave you be for the
survivors?”

“
Quite right,” Ross heard
from the shadows behind them. “Just what would the government think
about you keeping all the goodies for yourself?”

The voice was different.
There was glee in it, along with evil. It sent chills down his
spine as he slowly turned to face the man hiding in the
shadows.

“
You get out of here now,”
Ross ordered, though the fear in his voice made is sound more like
a plea than a command. He could just barely make out the man’s
shape in the gloom. His bright red, glowing eyes though, were easy
to spot. “Get gone.”

“
Tell me…” the thing said,
easing forward from the shadows. “Who would know the most about
this vessel?”

“
Ross… make it go away,”
his wife pleaded and her fear palpable.

“
I reckon I would,” Ross
replied meekly. “I am the captain.”

“
And how many souls upon
your fine vessel?”

“
Who are you mister? And
how did you get here in the first place?” Ross said, wishing he’d
already unlocked the arms locker and taken a pistol.

“
I am the death that comes
in the night. I am the bringer of darkness, the devourer of souls.
I have come for this place, Captain, and it, and your crew, are now
mine.”

Ross started to turn and
run but was distracted by the flash of steel teeth as the creature
stepped forward, grinning. The thing was on him in an instant and
it was right. It was death incarnate.

Two Moon Dawn

Cassandra had no idea how she’d created the bubble and didn’t
know how long she’d held the bubble that surrounded her and Jeremy.
But when the water finally receded back into the ocean, she
collapsed in a heap on the wet, murky ground that had been swept
clean. She closed her eyes and dreamt of a wolf.

The being in her mind was
in dire pain, but even through that torture, she could feel his
sadness. He was sad that his people, the wolves, had devolved into
the pack of angry animals that hunted her. Cassandra was sad for
what her people had done to his. So much sadness and pain. She knew
the thing was the enemy. It was of the beasts that killed her
mother. But she felt bad for it anyway.

She awoke to the sound of
a fire crackling and the smell of wet everywhere around her. She
sat up groggily, and rubbed her eyes.

“
Good morning,” the boy
told her. “Or afternoon. It’s hard to tell without the sun. I guess
we could have been a whole day? Asleep? It feels like day time
though.”

Cassandra had no idea what
the boy was talking about until she opened her eyes. The landscape
was black besides the little halo of light cast by the fire. Jeremy
sat cross-legged across from her, eye lids squeezed shut. The sky
was black and lightning arched out, illuminating the black, boiling
clouds. Thunder rocked, interspersed with the sounds of building
crumbling in the city proper. There were screams as well, in the
distance, and she couldn’t begin to imagine the depth of human
suffering in the ruins of Houston. The ground was covered in a
layer of brackish mud and the landscape was littered with the
busted up remains of cars and trucks that looked much like a giant
child had tossed them around. The neighborhood was reduced to
rubble. The houses were gone, their brick and two by four
structures scattered like broken matchsticks, and the foundations
were covered in the mud.

The smell was horrendous,
a mix of mud and death. She gagged before clearing her nose. She’d
lived around Houston all of her life and had seen the damage left
by hurricanes. That was nothing compared to this.

“
My god,” she whispered.
“It’s all gone.”

“
I know,” the boy
whispered.

Cassandra scooted closer
to the boy and put her arms around his shoulders. He was wearing
shorts, like her, and the temperature was dropping
rapidly.

“
It is daylight,” she
said, watching as the clouds parted long enough for her to catch a
glimpse of the new moon, a moon called Wormwood. “All the pieces of
the comet must have kicked up a lot of stuff in the
air.”

“
Like a nuclear winter,”
the boy said, agreeing.

“
You know about that
stuff?”

“
I read some stuff before
it all happened,” the boy began. “The chunk of debris acts just
like you said. They drive down into the earth and send up great
clouds of ash and dust. Volcanoes do the same thing. The clouds
cover the sky and block out the sun. It’s getting really cold,” the
boy said, teeth chattering. “I did the best I could with the fire
but all the wood I could find was wet. It was hard.”

That Jeremy had done it at
all was something, she thought, what with the whole no eye balls
thing he had going.

“
You did good,” she said,
trying to sound reassuring like her mother wood. “But the fire
isn’t going to help us once the temperature really starts to drop.”
Her clothes were soaked through and she felt the same chill. “We
need to find shelter somewhere.”

“
Where?” the boy asked.
“It’s all gone.”

“
I know a
place.”

“
Where?”

“
My house,” Cassandra told
him. “We had a basement and, if it’s not flooded, my mom kept all
kinds of survival stuff there.”

“
Your mom was a
prepper?”

“
Yeah, I guess so.” Not
that she knew just exactly what her mother was. Not really. There
was still so much to learn.

“
She was preparing for
something to happen. Storing water, food, stuff like
that?”

“
Yes, something like
that.” Cassandra had often thought her mother was obsessed and she
was right. She’d just been wrong what her mother was obsessed
about. The basement was filled to the brim with supplies. She
wished agains she’d stayed home with her mother, in the basement.
If she had, her mother might still be alive then.

“
Do you think the basement
survived?”

“
I don’t know. But even if
it’s filled with water, we’ll still be able to get some supplies,
right? She had clothing in vacuum sealed packs. We could probably
find some blankets too.” Not to mention guns. The silver swords
were nice and had a great effect on the wolves, but she wanted some
real fire power. The werewolves were not the only monsters in the
ruins.

“
I don’t really have
anything else to do, so if you don’t mind, I’ll go with you,”
Jeremy said seriously, as if she might turn the boy
down.

“
I wouldn’t have it any
other way.” She’d already started thinking of the kid as her
partner. They both were reborn in the new world with abilities they
had no idea about. They were kindred spirits and an odd team, for
sure, but they’d get through it.

“
We might as well get
going,” she said, standing. She still felt exhausted and knew that
the spell she’d inadvertently cast had drained her. The sooner they
made it home the sooner she could find something to eat and
recuperate. And then it was off to find that mysterious Church of
the Dead Wolf her mother had told her about. Was it even a real
thing or was it just the delusional rantings of a dying
woman?

A wolf howled in the
distance, reminding her of the seriousness of the situation. They’d
be coming for her, soon.